Creating Mindful Leaders

Chapter 10Sleepless Nights and the Walking Dead

People ask me if I sleep well at night with all of the competition. I tell them I sleep like a baby—I wake up every two hours and cry.

—Roberto C. Goizueta

Zombies are slowly killing your company culture. Are you one of them? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one‐third of us suffer from insomnia.¹ A growing body of work indicates that poor sleep is a killer. In fact, if you took the CDC map of U.S. sleep issues and overlaid it with their maps for heart disease and poor mental health, you'd find nearly perfect correlations across states.^2–4 People suffering from insomnia are 10 times more likely to suffer from depression, at 60% greater risk for obesity, and miss 11 more days of work annually because of absenteeism and presenteeism.⁵

Beyond taking years off of people's lives, insomnia also takes a toll on culture. Remember our definition of culture—consistent, observable patterns of behavior. If one‐third of your workforce (leaders included) have sleep issues, they also struggle with focusing, productivity, and generally being nice to co‐workers. Insomnia turns us into zombies looking to kill fun and rip the flesh from the joy around us. When you don't sleep, you may as well wear a T‐shirt that says, “Leave me alone. I'm a jerk today.” You don't have to imagine one‐third of your company experiencing ...